How can PHP developers efficiently convert a string to uppercase in a new variable?
To convert a string to uppercase in PHP, developers can use the `strtoupper()` function. This function takes a string as input and returns the string with all characters converted to uppercase. To store the uppercase string in a new variable, developers can simply assign the result of `strtoupper()` to the new variable.
$string = "hello world";
$uppercaseString = strtoupper($string);
echo $uppercaseString; // Output: HELLO WORLD